Is Livetrack tied to Time Progression?

Since the pCARS2 days this has been sort of a blackbox, opaque question that's not been cleared up. Now, Livetrack 3.0 undoubtedly is working better in AMS2 than in pCARS2. Not least because the tires and the AI are just so much more improved. It's working really nice.

However, it's still not clear if the Livetrack changes are influenced, or are tied 1 to 1 to Time Progression, and it should be made clear whether it is, or isn't. The reason is, if we have 3 slots, 3 lap race. Dry, Rain, Dry, synced to race for simplicity. If LiveTrack is not tied to Time Progression (A), then the track will get wet depending solely on the amount of time it rains. So if it rains for 1 lap - say 1.5 minutes, then the track would get as wet as the amount of water that got dropped on it, and no more. This, tbh, would be my expectation and what I personally would prefer.

However, if it is tied to Time Progression (B), and Time Progression is set to say x25, then the game will interpret that it in fact rained for upwards of an hour. So it would get a lot more wetter than it would have otherwise, and it can catch the player out.

Now, mind you, this does happen in real life. We've seen the clips of car after car slipping in the same corner, in F1, and just last year and LeMans. It can happen. But for the sake of gameplay, if (B) is in fact how the engine handles LiveTrack, then it should be made clear so we can pit appropriately. Thoughts?

As always, great job Reiza, thank you for all you do!

 

Thank you! So, to confirm, in the case that we use Real Weather, which matches weather progression to Time progression (as it should), then the livetrack water progression will be tied to Time Progression in that case.

So if we do a race with Time Progression set to real time or x2, then we can expect that water progression to not be as extreme than if we're simulating a 24 hour race in one hour. This is important to know - I think now we know that if its starts raining during our LeMans races, we should pit right away.

 

This is also good info for the next generation of driving simulator - which Reiza is helping Straight 4 with, I think.

Hopefully in the next iteration of the engine, LiveTrack water progression can be simulated in real time only, separate from weather progression (dictating how fast the weather changes) and time progression (how fast the sun rises or sets) - so the player can better predict how wet or how dry a track will change by based on how long it's been raining.